Paper short abstract:

Late Edo tales of vengeance were a prolific literary production born out of the Kansei Reform to disseminate neo-Confucian tenets supported by the Bakufu. These theories evolved over time, and so did the typical structure of tales of vengeance, under the pressure of the new paradigms.

Paper long abstract:

Published from the end of the eighteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth, the tales of vengeance, or katakiuchimono, were a prolific production whose intent was to disseminate among the readers the neo-Confucian orthodoxy supported by the military government in the immediate aftermath of the Kansei Reform (1787-93). Since the beginning of their publication, they presented a recurring structure and a list of dramatis personae, with specific functions, strongly influenced by the ideology. When time passed by, the intellectual paradigms at the foundation of the subgenre changed, thus affecting the entire production. Among these, the concept of natural order (shizen), quintessential to the entire Kansei Reform, gave way to the concept of invention (sakui). This, together with the new social and economic theories produced by Kaiho Seiryō (1755-1817) and by other thinkers, such as Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) and Satō Nobuhiro (1769-1850), just to mention a few, had a pivotal impact on tales of vengeance, leading to many transformations in the typical structure of the subgenre, in its functions, and in the number and typology of dramatis personae.

My paper aims to outline how this production evolved between Kansei and Man'en periods. It is based on a selection of seven tales of vengeance published from the immediate aftermath of the Kansei Reform to the sixth decade of the nineteenth century, and will follow a two-fold approach: on the one hand, morphology will be the core of my analysis; on the other, I will follow the evolution of late Edo history of ideas in order to show how a production that was always considered as a mere expression of the Confucian propaganda evolved through time, including different types of ideologies.